


A Couple of the Wires in my Heart are Broke

by sleepscribbling



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-17
Updated: 2010-06-17
Packaged: 2017-10-14 09:27:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/147807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleepscribbling/pseuds/sleepscribbling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rory's gone, and only Amy and the Doctor can remember him. The Doctor tries to comfort Amy by sleeping with her. AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Couple of the Wires in my Heart are Broke

**Author's Note:**

> Written for an Eleventy Kink prompt: [“Eleven/Amy, super sad comfort!sex: Rory sacrifices himself to save Amy and the Doctor.”](http://community.livejournal.com/eleventy_kink/365.html?page=8#comments) Beta by altarii. Title is a lyric from Dan Black’s “Symphonies.”

“It’s no use, Rory,” Amy calls over the howl of the _Amaranth_ ’s engines. “The Dalek fleet won’t just fly into the crack! They don’t understand it any better than we do.”

“They would follow the Doctor into that crack,” Rory says. He takes the jacket from Amy’s hands and shrugs it on in an instant, then he puts the bowtie around his collar in another fluid motion. “We’ll just have to hope that the Raggedy Doctor works just as well.”

He kisses her, hard. Then he pulls away, and steps deftly through the door of the ship. It closes a few seconds later. As the ship crashes up through the planet’s atmosphere, towards the crack in the moon and the Dalek Command ships, she hears over her headset a cry of “Geronimo!”

That’s the last time Amy, or anyone, sees Rory Williams again.

~

Three days after the Amaranth Incident, after Rory’s sacrificed himself to save time and space, and the crack has been sealed, a confused, scared Amy Pond stumbles into the control room of the TARDIS.

She’s been crying, the Doctor sees in an instant. Her eyes are red and puffy; the fact that she makes no attempt to conceal how messed-up she is serves as a testament to how badly Rory’s death hit her. Her posture is a thin slump, her gorgeous hair is a complete mess, and all she’s wearing is a thin nightgown, the same flowing, white garment she wore when she first followed the Doctor out into the stars.

She gazes at the Doctor, as if looking at a very far-off picture of him, and asks, “Doctor, do you sleep?”

He nods. “Sometimes. Not as often as a human, but once a week at least or I’m rubbish in the mornings. And really,” he says sadly, “it’s a decent way to fill up the time.” The Doctor walks right up to her, gazes at her. “Amy, you’re not all right,” he says.

“Are _you_ all right?” she asks.

“I’m always all right.”

Amy barks out a laugh, which sputters out into a sob.

“You’re a mess, Amy Pond,” he says. “An absolute mess. You should get on to bed.”

She doesn’t protest, allowing his hand on her shoulder to ground her as he steers her back to the little nest she’s made for herself in a corner of the TARDIS.

He lays her down on the bed. She gives him a doleful look and, not needing any more persuasion, he slips up onto the bed, toeing off his shoes and sitting down next to her on the blankets. She doesn’t talk, or make any move towards sleep, just sits over the covers and stares down at her hands. Her hair cascades down, hiding her face.

“Look, Amy,” the Doctor says, finally. “Nothing is okay right now, and I understand that. You think I haven’t lost people, haven’t driven people to their deaths?” Amy looks up, flatly.

“I know you feel responsible. But you were the only one with him at the end and I – I shouldn’t have left you in that position, with the crack getting bigger and the light and the Dalek Eternal and….”

Amy puts a hand on his shoulder. “You were wrestling with the High Dalek Army,” she says. “It’s not like you had a choice. Not like you could’ve stopped him.

“Doctor,” she says, seizing his shoulder and yanking his face close to hers, “how the hell do you deal with it? You’re nine-hundred-something, a human lifetime’s like a month in the country for you. I mean, you must’ve seen thousands of people dying; the clerics at the Byzantium, Father Octavian, Signora Calvierri, River Song, all the ones before that…”

“We carry on as best we can, Amy,” he says finally. “I do, you will eventually…I’m just good at hiding these things now. Wish there was more I could say to help you, but I don’t know anything else.” She looks at his face and thinks she sees the glimmer of a stray tear, but it might be just a trick of the light.

She doesn’t say anything for a while. So the Doctor shifts closer and hugs her, holding her close. She buries her face in his shoulder. He breathes in, and Amy smells sharp and sweet, but fragile. And then she raises her head and he shifts and their faces are very close, and, desperately trying to make things better, he kisses her. It’s a warm, clumsy kiss; the dynamic couldn’t feel more different from their first one, desperate and shoved up against the TARDIS. Then, Rory’s absence had been a risk and thrill, now it’s just an absence, a huge sucking hole between where Amy’s heart and the Doctor’s heart are, completely empty. She could be back to Leadworth in five minutes, and their wedding wouldn’t be in the morning; not if she showed up at the church or in the courthouse with all the guests she’d invited and all the well-wishers who would now question the name Rory Williams and who wouldn’t know. The Doctor is the only other one who can remember Rory, and just for that Amy kisses him back softly and pretends what they’re doing is more sexy than sad.

The kissing is slow and tender, sloppy around the edges. When Amy presses her tongue up against the Doctor’s mouth, the Doctor tenses up, but lets her in, kissing her deeply. What Amy wants, at this point, he’s decided Amy gets. She deserves it.

She leans back, on her knees now. “Would Rory really—”

“Rory would want you to be happy,” the Doctor says, before kissing her again. “He would want us to be happy.” They both relax into it this time, muted motions, tongues sliding over each other. The Doctor embraces her and she slides her arms around him, clutching tight. The kisses grow more desperate and fierce, Amy crying out for support and the Doctor answering her, pushing into her mouth, kissing her back over and over. They both taste salty from the tears that have rolled down their cheeks, but somehow that fuels the fire, as if by kissing away the tears they can negate them.

The Doctor keeps a hand on Amy’s back and, with the other, unbuttons his shirt. (His usual jacket, now erased from existence, was never replaced, and the Doctor has since taken off the bow tie in a small memorial.) Amy snakes a hand between them, splays her palm out, and feels the Doctor’s heartbeats going double-fast.

“Doctor…” Amy whimpers. “Doctor, this isn’t right… We were going to get married in the morning. Not now, Doctor. Now with you – so soon – you’re so wonderful, but—I don’t know—we were going to get married.”

“Amy,” the Doctor whispers, “I’m sorry. I know I’m brilliant, but in a lot of ways I’m a shoddy substitute next to Rory Williams. I’m a time traveler, Amy. No matter how many humans I surround myself with, they’ll never live any longer than their lives. Human lives are like far-off glimmers to me, precious but completely ephemeral. I’ve known you for maybe a month; he’s known most of your life. And you’ve been there for most of his. I could never forge such a bond with a human being. Never. He was your fiancé, and every time I looked at you there were so many years of meaning, years – nearly decades – of friendship, of love, underlying every move you made. He understood you, Amy. Do you think I understand you? Really understand you?” His hand strokes her face, down her side, her left breast. “I just want to make the demons go away.”

Amy looks right at him, and there’s such a naked need in her eyes it’s almost dripping out like tears. Like tears made of sand. He sighs and says, “Look. Compared to Rory, I am nothing to you; a threefold stranger who happened to pass by your garden, a figure from the shadows out of the corner of your eye, a boy from a fairytale. But I’m willing. Do you want to do this?”

“Shut up and let’s make love,” Amy whispers. She swallows a sob, and says, “It sounds more…healing that way. The Doctor and Amelia Pond making love.”

He helps her lift the nightgown, watching the way it bunches up, the thin whiteness of the fabric, and the smooth skin revealed, gazing over her hips, her torso, her chest. She looks small lying there in her knickers, small and injured like a wounded bird.  She shrugs the nightgown off her head, and tosses it across the room; it flies like a swan before crumpling in a corner.

He kisses her and she kisses him, slow and wet and dragged-out. By the end of it, her hands are on the fly of his trousers. The Doctor bends back a little, fingers the clasp on her bra and opens it as smoothly as if with sonics. He hooks a finger under Amy’s underwear, and she draws up her legs and slips out of it while doing the same with the Doctor’s pants, lowering them away, down his knees to the point where he can kick them off and let them flutter down to the floor. There’s a moment.

“You look human,” she whispers in his ear, before kissing the lobe, sucking on it.

And unlike she expected, he replies, “I know.”

Amy had half-hoped, in some corner of her mind, that she wouldn’t be able to sleep with him, that after all they couldn’t get much further than kissing, which Rory had grudgingly forgiven back when he existed. She’d wondered if the Doctor would have some kind of alien anatomy, like two cocks or eerie smoothness like a doll or something altogether foreign, like a flesh-colored handkerchief of Gallifreyan reproduction. Anything, really, besides what the other corners of her mind hoped for and what she could expect from a man back on Earth. Amy gazes at him unadorned, as she once did from the back in a far-away London hospital while her fiancé averted his eyes. The Doctor’s half-hard penis just leans against the curve of his hip guiltily. It may have been through ages and eternities of time and space, to the end of the universe and back, but looks no different for it, slightly larger than Rory’s but no matter that now it hardly made a difference in any way. The slight excited leap in some other part of her comes as some surprise, feels almost like a betrayal. Any pleasure either of them derive from this encounter is weighed against the scything pain of losing Rory. And that is all that is letting her justify this, this one-night stand.

The Doctor won’t pretend he hasn’t done this before, that he knows nothing – through all his regenerations – of human carnality, that he never slept with Rose or imagined coupling with Madame de Pompadour or River Song. But he’s never done something quite like this before, been so impossibly close to the one companion left after a pair has come and gone. Never.

The Eleventh Doctor’s virgin body slides up against Amy and feels a kind of shock. Stripped bare, the awareness of her lost fiancé is exposed just as much as Amy’s breasts and the thin curve between her legs. Everywhere he touches her skin he feels the ghost of Rory. It clings to her like film, like the thin hairs on her arms and legs.

“Amy, I know this has to be difficult for you,” the Doctor says, feeling obligated to say something. “Tell me to stop if it gets to be too much.”

Then he slips inside Amy, and rocks into her, and almost has to stop because of the memories he’s all too certain he’s pressing up against. 

They overlap, the naked Doctor pressing into her, and it feels somewhat sickening, somehow both violating and sacred. He bites his bottom lip and slides a little further, a little deeper, things beginning to blur around the edges a little. Amy makes noises that sound like crying but he can’t quite interpret. She feels uncomfortably tight, choked, full of promises and choices and all the moments she and Rory shared that led up to this point. It’s all too rough, and there are great flashes like lightning, and the Doctor thrusts and feels silence, and all at once they split apart, him sliding out of her, tumbling away from each other to different sides of the bed.

“No.”

“Yeah, I can’t do it,” Amy whispers. “Sorry.”

The Doctor shifts to face her again. “Me neither.”

“Maybe someday?” Amy asks, lamely, resting her head against his shoulder. “I still…”

“Amy. I know.” He kisses the crown of her head, her forehead, her nose, her lips for a few seconds, then begins weaving his way down her body.

He kisses her breasts, his mouth warm and heavy over her chest, her heart. His hands busy themselves in the tangle of her crimson hair, stroking where it meets her back.

Amy closes her eyes. _If he always told the truth, then you wouldn’t have to trust him._

He kisses down, further and further, licking her navel, and lowering. The Doctor twists his tongue down and around, lighting on her inner thigh, then the other thigh, licking and kissing and driving her mad. She bucks her hips up underneath him, frantically. He shifts his tongue and makes patterns inside her, moving his mouth with flourishes and drawing tiny circles.

Amy makes soft, human noises, leans back and murmurs nonsense words alongside gasps of “Yes” and “faster.”

She moans and sputters and reaches for the Doctor; her nails tighten against his shoulders as he licks. He licks one more time, tight and fast within her. And then a warm wave of oblivion sweeps over her, covering her like a tidal wave. “Rory…” she half-whispers, half-moans into the air. Then, half-delirious, “Doctor.” And as much as he’s never been there, for all the times he’s disappointed her or left her behind, he’s there for her now when Amy needs him most, and for just a few seconds the ache of Rory being gone simmers down to a dull throb.

Mind washed almost clear, she steadies her body, then slides closer to the Doctor and gropes for his body. Amy touches the Doctor in the silence, walking her fingers down his body until she reaches his shaft. She grips it and strokes against him blindly, working by instinct and memory and the soft moans he lets her hear. She builds a rhythm, working thoroughly and in near-silence. Her hand pumps him and he thrusts and climaxes. The Doctor gives a final cry of bliss that sounds bittersweet to her time-traveler ears, and waxy liquid leaks over her hand.

They’re exhausted by the end of it, sticky and wet, freezing with grief but hot in each other’s arms. Amy wraps herself further around the Doctor and says, like a petulant child of seven, “Stay.” His only response is to hold her tighter.

When they wake up, a day later, the TARDIS is floating amidst the Ratsilver Asteroid Field in the 32nd century, in the middle of the Sontaran Civil War. They uncoil, disentwine themselves, and dress as the Doctor explains their circumstances. They’ll certainly have a tricky enough time of it, full of life-or-death situations. “Let’s go save the universe,” Amy says.

“It’s what Rory would’ve wanted.”


End file.
